The AMD Radeon R9 Nano Review: The Power of Size
by Ryan Smith on September 10, 2015 8:00 AM ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds the “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2015.
As with Battlefield 4, the R9 Nano solidly secures its place relative to the Fury lineup, delivering 90-95% of the performance of the R9 Fury X and R9 Fury respectively. This pushes the card’s performance below 60fps even at 3840x2160 low quality, but it’s more than enough for 2560x1440.
However once we do reach 2560, we find that the R9 Nano is now tied with the GTX 980 at just over 65fps. As we mentioned on the last page the GTX 980 is the biggest threat to the R9 Nano from an efficiency standpoint, and this is why. Limiting our scope to just mini cards however finds the R9 Nano comfortably ahead of the GTX 970 Mini.
Meanwhile Crysis 3 is a great example of why AMD is poking at themselves by comparing the R9 Nano to the GTX 290X. The card is little more than half the length of AMD’s former flagship and yet delivers 22% better performance while drawing much less power (more on that later). In doing so AMD is clearly picking a low point to make their gains look better, but at the same time it shows that yes, AMD can in fact improve over R9 290X on performance, power, and noise all at the same time.
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palindrome - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
See the 780Ti as a perfect example.Michael Bay - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Wow, nV designed chips for what was appropriate at the time and AMD did not! That`s how bad nV is!AMD apologies are not even anymore funny at this point, just sad.
palindrome - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
Man, I wish I had the money to drop $600+ on a GPU every year like some of you NV die-hards...HollyDOL - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
I suspect when Dx12 gets widely adopted the requirements of games will exceed what any card today can provide. My bet is it will take at least first generation of HBM2 cards on new (<28nm) process to handle it well. So maybe for a certain period AMD might get upper hand, but I expect that's all.Gigaplex - Thursday, September 10, 2015 - link
DX12 lowers the requirements, it doesn't increase them. It'll be a long time before the majority of games require hardware faster than current cards, due to the console port phenomenon.HollyDOL - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
Ye, I know it does, but... during all those years (let's say in last ~15-18 years or so) game requirements in full detail settings steadily grow, it would surprise me a lot if the requirements suddenly dropped, but I won't complain if that happens :-)lmcd - Saturday, September 12, 2015 - link
@Gigaplex*lowers the cpu requirements, it doesn't increase them
FIFY
And you just neglected game advancements and all the work that'll be best offloaded to the GPU (to avoid traveling over the bus).
D. Lister - Friday, September 11, 2015 - link
By the time dx12 becomes mainstream, which could take 3-4 years, you'll probably have to buy the Radeon brand from someone like Samsung. That is, if they care to keep the brand alive at all.K_Space - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
Lots of talk about the potential AMD buy out on seeking Alpha, most think it'll be post 2019 though (and depending on Zen and DX12 +/- console porting maybe not any time soon).D. Lister - Thursday, September 17, 2015 - link
What is 2015 + 4?